


Things Fall Apart

by bkgrl



Category: The Originals (TV), The Vampire Diaries & Related Fandoms, The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-08
Updated: 2020-11-09
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:06:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27458461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bkgrl/pseuds/bkgrl
Summary: How did "the Originals" begin? The story of the true origins of Klaus, Elijah, Kol and Rebekah. Or at least my own version.
Kudos: 3





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Wrote this story years ago and it was called "I'm Not Calling You a Liar". That story was never a true Klaroline story. It was always meant to be a story about the Originals. Only this story has vastly different mythology. Its a story of my own making about how the Originals came to become the creatures they are now. Their true makers and the hunters that hunted them.

**Prologue**

**1939 AD**

**Berlin, Germany**

You could cut the cigarette smoke with a knife. Puffs slipping between privilege white teeth, liquored lips, swirling into hypnotic clouds that collected and rose towards the gold encrusted light fixtures. Through the crowd, Klaus surveyed the dimly lit room as their host directed both he and his companion to their table. Seated amongst other officers, government officials, their wives, lovers and girlfriends a like, the woman he’d brought couldn’t have been more delighted. A mindless, vapid, social climber, she was all too happy to latch onto him and follow any instruction he gave her. Banal as she were, she would serve her purpose. She was just another decoy of distraction to help him wedge his way into the vast social group that was “The Party”.

Smirking, Klaus choked back the sarcasm and immediate boredom that overwhelmed him as he pretended to listen and care about the tedious things the men around him discussed. Politics, theories of strategic aggression: Poland, Austria, England, France flitted off their tongues as though they were toys being pushed around the table. “Tinker toil little soldiers,” he muttered inaudibly under his breath.

_Humans and their inconsequential wars_ , Klaus mused to himself. They seemed to think the most mundane things justified invading countries, redrawing territories, ripping down another’s monument to raise their own. Not long ago in the fall of 1916, he was in eastern France, watching men march to the slaughter. Fathers at that time, preparing themselves for the inevitable. Telling themselves it was for the greater good if their sons became rotted piles of meat in foreign fields. All while wives rung their hands, preparing for widowhood. They told themselves they were stopping some great evil and that all who fought were heroes. Those fools, as with these, didn’t understand what evil truly was. It wasn’t the adversary that made itself known, pronouncing its intent to destroy but rather the snake in the grass amongst them. Depravity was the things at play, which were so much greater than their little human lives. The only heroes of the Great War, as with each before: the Crusades, the Hundred Years War, the Chinese Civil Conflict, the Spanish Crusade, French Revolution, the war among the American territories, to name a few- were those intelligent enough to seek only what was in their personal best interest.

Country, God, philosophies and a moral right were only for those that rotted in open fields, long forgotten by the old men that had sent them there. Humans, were the inanest of creatures, so proud and yet so puerile. Elijah was a fool to seriously involve himself with them and their politics. They were ants milling about their sand pile, frantically trying to exist, only to be squashed- their entire purpose lost in a matter of seconds.

“Do you not agree, Sir?”

“Hmm…” he paused as if in thought, “Yes, indeed, the British will soon relent in their frivolous air raids,” he offered ambiguously, playing their little game, feigning interest when all he could think of were other more pressing matters he wished to begin addressing. Mainly, where was the Berkovich girl now?

The crowd of chattering voices at each table, softened to a dull murmur as the curtain to the stage slowly rose, revealing the orchestra. The night’s entertainment would be no different than usual- drinking, talk of politics and dancing. Klaus taking his private feeding from Lydia before cigars, brandy and another verbal hunt for the information he needed.

_“There is a house in New Orleans. They call it the Rising Sun…”_ the entertainer’s voice poured out over the crowd slow as molasses, with a kind of southern charm he hadn’t heard since Klaus had left the American south years ago.

Removing her white gloves, his date leaned forward, cigarette in hand, prompting him for a light. Obliging, somewhat begrudgingly, irritated he was forced into such trivial formalities, Klaus glanced over her shoulder, the flame burning the edge of her cigarette bud when it happened. He saw _her_ and that was the moment when the whole world came crashing into some invisible force, lurching his conscience forward at the speed of light only to run head long into steel and ice. The whiskey he’d just sipped, sat sharp and caustic at the back of his throat, eliciting a curt cough and quick gasp for air.

In a harlequin mint green satin dress that dipped well below her collarbone and clung to her frame, he recognized those hands, that neck and her mouth before Lyanna continued, “ _And it’s been the ruin of many a poor girl, and me, oh God, I’m one.”_

White curls sat heavy on bare shoulders, red lips hovering centimeters above the metallic microphone she cradled in her hands, “ _My father was a gamblin’ man, his fortune, taken away._ _If I had only listened to what my momma said, I’d be at home today….”_

Blue eyes of an all too familiar adversary peered past the stage lights into the crowd. It was the face that had too many names to curse at once: Hannah, Christine, Nataline, Interloper, Devil, Misery, etc. and the first, the one he’d never forget no matter how desperately he would try. It was her that lead him straight to the gates of hell where only loss and despair awaited him.

_“But being so young and a foolish girl, I let a gambler lead me astray.”_

"Lyanna," he whispered like a prayer, the final vowel laying on his tongue pungent in its memory. One look at her in that mint dress and the ghost of almost five centuries past, called him back, singing the tale of a lifetime not too far gone. Memories, he’d carefully placed into damp Strathclyde soil and tried desperately to forget. Klaus felt as though he were being choked by the Louisiana summer heat all over again. There were so many unpleasant things- memories flooding him at once.

“Impossible…” what he was seeing simply couldn’t be. She was dead. Nataline was buried six feet under southern soil, in St. Louis Cemetery with her child.

_“You see my sweetheart is a drunkard, Lord. Drinks down in New Orleans.”_

_She was the last one_ … echoed in Klaus’s mind, an accusation levied against nature, time and any concrete sense of reality he had retained after a 1000 years of life. The last hunter, the final bane of his existence and the thing that drew him back to the sickly southern states time and time again.

A strange, horrid and annoyingly familiar feeling of hatred and nostalgia flooded him. The Chinese had a word for it, they called it _Yuanfen_ : a predetermination of a relationship beyond one's control. The Portuguese called it _Saudade_ : the longing for someone that you lost- a vague and constant remembrance of something that cannot be.

_“Now the only thing that man needs is a suitcase and a trunk. And the only time he’s satisfied lord, is when he’s drunk.”_

The sound of her voice was smooth as well aged and barreled scotch but sharp as a razor blade in its accuracy in accusation. If he was naïve or superstitious, Klaus would have called it fate but a thousand years and ten lifetimes had cured him of such silly notions. It wasn't fate, destiny, or any other mysterious barrier of joy, but more the reaper of misfortune- his Maker, he had to thank.

_“Somebody go get my baby sister….”_

It had been decades and he could still smell her perfume, hear her criticism and feel her skin. Leaving a bitter laugh coated with the ridiculousness of this ever-evolving situational irony catching somewhere between his throat and mouth. She always seemed to find him when he was close to the bottom, circling somewhere between getting everything he ever wanted and toeing the line- threatening to careen over the edge of sanity with no visible end.

 _“Tell her to do, never to do what I have done,”_ she sang on as if it was her final warning.

“Is there something wrong?” his date cooed, rubbed her hand over his thigh. She dropped her cigarette into the ashtray as she reached for her glass of champagne, waiting for his reply.

“The girl,” he nodded in the direction of the stage, “What do you know of her?”

“ _Live her life in sin and misery, remembering the man from the House of the Rising Sun….”_

Nails scraped along the seam of his pants, as his date smiled her bain irritated smirk and glanced over her shoulder, “Nothing, just another performer… one not taken to the camps.”

“Is she Jewish?” Klaus stared up at the hunter, examining Aryan features: whiteish blond hair, blue eyes and other attributes that were clearly identical to the many before. Still however, he looked fatuously for signs of only one in particular.

Lydia laughed, leaning in closer, “Of course not. Why do you care?”

“I don’t,” he lied, reaching for his glass, summoning the waiter as she sang the final lines, “ _Now my journey here is almost over, my race is almost won._ ”

“Isn’t she delightful?” one of the men at their table commented, eyes transfixed. Everyone in the room was completely enamored, like flies trapped in amber, unable to resist each word that dripped out of her throat as a slow, silvery, sap. They hated Americans with such fervor but ate their culture spoon in hand, faces flummox at their charming folk songs. As though they were watching colorful monkeys in gilded cages perform the last act of a dying civilization of pointless youthful struggle. So in contrast to the German’s own smug certainty. Naïve to Motherland’s own understanding of such a depth of sorrow.

Klaus knew better. That fruit may be succulent, saccharine and inviting but that fine of a wine came from a poisoned vine. Not to be tasted, even if only once from curiosity stemming from an assuredness of survival.

With the conclusion of the song: “ _Yes… I’m going back to spend my life with the man from the House of The Rising Sun,”_ a generous applause erupted throughout the room.

The songstress looking out over the crowd and bowed. Accepting the praise, she turned to leave the stage but not before stopping once more. With one hand on the railing, the other gripping the silk material of her green dress, she glanced out again into the audience until her focus fell on Klaus.

It lasted less than seconds and to anyone else, it would have been a passing glance but as their eyes met, he knew, sure as ever, it wasn’t a coincidence: that look, _that_ song and the timing. It was everything. 

Nodding to patrons as she passed, the songstress stopped at the bar, leaning over and whispering something to the bartender before exiting through one of the side doors. Quickly rising, Klaus excused himself from his company, ignoring Lydia’s protests as he followed _the_ _sickness_ without thought.

She would dead before the band had cued up for the next song. He was sure of it. He had to be. Klaus was too close, now. He didn't have time to deal with this aberration. He'd have to kill her, simple as that. He couldn’t afford interruptions or distractions. Klaus would find her, cornering her in some dark hall and snap her neck. Ending it before the sickening cycle could begin again and she’d ruin his plans. Pushing past the waiters that gathered at the bar and patrons making their way to the dance floor, he burst through the exit doors half expectantly to find her there, coyly waiting for him. Looking both ways down the long dimly lit corridor, he found himself alone.

She couldn’t have gone far.

And then he spotted her. The gentle swishing of silk rubbing against other materials, heavy breaths, heels on marble floors and a flash of harlequin as she turned the corner most distant to him. Straightening the lapels of his officer’s uniform, Klaus smiled to himself, comforted finally. Soon, very soon- moments really, it would be done forever. His seemingly eternal game of whack- a- mole, concluding with choked ending.

They were all dead.

Every child of the hunters, boy or girl, vanquished. Whatever illusion this one was would soon be eliminated as well and then… finally then, Klaus would have it. Long lasting relief that had eluded him for close to a millennium.

Following the sounds of her, he was practically glowing with joy, breathing down her neck that he planned to snap clean in two. His mouth watering with anticipation, like a dog waiting for that preverbal bell when it happened. Turning the same corner as she, in his own a frenzied haste, Klaus ran head long into something sharp and boney. A waiter he clumsily knocked to the ground.

“I’m sorry, Sir,” the older man pandered, looking up at him apologetically. Wrinkled, spotted hands shuffling across the floor trying to find even ground.

“It’s fine,” Klaus muttered, eyes darting across empty floors and barren hall that lead to a dead end.

“Are you sure, Sir? I didn’t hurt you?” Heavily rising from the floor as he dusting himself off, the elderly gentleman smoothed the few thin grey strands of hair that fell over his forehead.

“Yes! Now, where is she?” Klaus barked, eyes feverishly scanning the hallway.

“Where is who, Sir?” The old man questioned, following his gaze as they both stared down the empty corridor before his gaze fell back to Klaus.

“The woman, old man! The performer wearing the green dress.”

“Performer?” he questioned, hands straightening every crease in his uniform, meticulously, “There is no woman in this hall, Sir.”

“You think I cannot see that?!” Klaus snapped, glowering at the puttering employee. “There was a woman that came this way. Where is she now?” he demanded, his hand sitting heavy and threating on the man’s shoulder.

“Well I do not know, Sir. I saw no woman,” the old man promised, aghast.

Looking past the waiter, at the doors on opposite side of the hall, Klaus inquired, “Where do those lead to?”

Wholly confused, the employee replied, “A storage room, Sir and the street-”

Klaus was down the hall, trying the first door before the waiter was able to finish his sentence.

Finding the storage room locked, he turned, pushing open the door that led into a narrow alley. Cool fall air blew past him as he stepped outside. Examining the south end of the small space, Klaus was positive it was the only way she possibly could have gone. He let the door to the club click closed behind him as he sped down the narrow cobblestones between two the buildings, following it until the alley opened up onto the streets. Almost completely abandoned there was not a person in sight for yards except the shopkeeper three doors down, locking up for the night.

Frantic, panic fired through every nerve ending he possessed. _No, there was no possible way he had lost her. She was right in front of him._

Klaus would search every alley, every side street, and every shop window but find nothing. She had disappeared as if she were only a figment of his imagination. A lingering nightmare or perhaps something more sinister, like hope.

She was different every lifetime, never the same Lyanna, never another Nataline but always the same woman. He should have known it wouldn't be easy now, not when he was so close. He should have known, after a thousand years they would find some new way to evade him. Isn't that after all, what animals did? They adapted, adjusted, selecting for their environment, so as to become better predators. Each time she left him; she would come back more potent than the last.

They were the only threat that would keep him glancing over his shoulder, send him scouring the streets at night even if it were in vain. It would have been easier to believe that she was truly just a ghost. It could have been so much simpler if he had finally allowed himself to believe in the correct lies. He knew what he’d seen. But he wasn’t foolish enough to be so pleasantly naïve. Klaus would know her face- _that_ face, anywhere. The perfect killer, same eyes, different name, she would be slow to act but agonizing in her execution. He would expect nothing less. She was alive. Waiting out there for just the right moment with only one enemy in mind.

 _It won’t be the same,_ he would tell himself a thousand times that night alone. This time he'd learned. Hannah, Lyanna, Christine, Nataline… whatever her name may be. She wouldn't be as lethal this time. He wouldn't allow it.

Walking back into Amon’s, disturbed but still confident of his plan, Klaus sung low under his breath as he prepared for battle, “My race is almost won…. I’m going back to New Orleans, to crush The Rising Sun.”

This time it would be different, he promised himself. It had to be….


	2. Chapter 1

**Chapter 2**

**989 AD**

**Ireland**

Off the coast of Vodii, deep in the forest there lived a pair of mismatched girls in a small hut so well hidden that it hadn’t been visited by outsiders in years. Miles from the nearest village or human residence, the old woman that lived on that land cared for the two girls that were not her own. Ester and Aiyanna, born only days apart, never knew a father or mother, only their caretaker. A woman with no history. If Iona once had a husband and children of her own, the girls would never know. In their child minds her life began with them and ended when they parted. She had no village, no clan, no others of her line left. Only the two girls that had been brought to her as babies, taken from their people to be raised in the protection of isolation.

Ester’s earliest memories were of this soft woman, with warm knobby hands covered in tiny brown spots. Her hair was always short, cut with the dullest of knives once a month so that the thick strands of her whitish grey hair sat just above her shoulders. Iona was never young in Ester’s memory. She was never light on her feet and always walking with a slight hobble. One leg seemingly never at the same length as the other. In the girls’ minds, Iona never slept but she also was never tired. Neither of them would ever be able to recall a moment when they were awake that Iona was not. She was watching, listening, on guard for any slight change in their seemingly isolated part of the world. For the first eleven years of their life, neither girl ever saw another living been in the forest other than each other and their protector, Iona. Although they never called her mother, always by her name, Iona was not just a teacher, protector and keeper of the girls. She was and would always be the most intimate maternal energy they would know. Mother in everything but name.

In the first eleven years, the best of their childhood, the two girls were taught everything they would need to know to survive in the world outside their forest. In that short period of their lives, Ester and Aiyanna learned more than some humans did in their entire existence. They were educated in basic survival, the ways of the land and its animals. Which plants they could eat that would provide superior nourishment and which ones, with only touch could make their skin break out in horrible red, itching rashes that would make any person wish to peal the skin from their own bodies. They learned to make rudimentary tinctures and ointments. The girls understood when it was necessary to take an animal’s life for nourishment and the most humane way to do so. They were taught how to provide shelter for themselves, anywhere they may be and how to always find clean water, even if it needed to be tapped from the trunks of the Alder trees. But most importantly, both Ester and Aiyanna were educated in ways of their people. Their history, their gifts and the reason, the girls had been brought to heart of the Voddi forest. Iona had no drawn pictures, written down teachings, nothing to illuminate the history she would share. She would leave no trace of what the girls had been taught. Using only her voice, to paint imagines for her girls in the small room of their thatched hut. Her descriptions so vivid, her conviction so intense that her words drew imagines in the girl’s minds, conjuring up another world for them made of smoke and air.

The girls’ people, the Fae, could be traced back to a time long before the monks landed on their shores, building _their_ monasteries and bringing word of _their_ God. The first Fae were born from many human mothers but only one father. His name was Shamsiel. In the light of day, he would find them lost in the forest. These human women were drawn there inexplicably by some intangible force. It pulled at their eyes and ears, coaxing them to follow, enticing them to pursue their urge until they could deny it no longer. Like ghosts they wandered into woods not knowing where they were going, how far they had traveled or how they would return. Some walked for days, following that illusive pull that called to them as the sweetest of sounds. And when they saw it, the colors of the woodlands splintering into dozens of different shades of greens, yellows and blues they’d never seen before, they knew they were there.

The light that had guided them to that place heightened to such a blaze that it was blinding. Stopping them in their tracks until it dulled to fine point and they could see him at last. And to their unconscious expectations he was more beautiful than anything they could imagine. His hair a burnt burgundy and skin a pale ocher that glowed. Enamored at such opulence, these women were easily seduced, dozens of them lying with him and thereafter producing Halflings.

The first of the Fae children were as inhuman as their father. Their skin the same pale ocher, glowing perhaps not as bright but just as stunning. It was unquestionable that they were not of their earthly fathers. Their features too pristine and their gifts unlike anything the people of that land had seen before. Children of the Fae could seduce any human they chose: their beauty undeniable, their bodies aging at a much slower rate than humans until they stopped aging altogether. Any plant or animal they touched was affected by their presence. Their crops grew healthy each season without disease. They could speak to animals in a way unknown to man, communicating to them in an unspoken language. They became keepers of every inhuman life they touched. Protectors of nature and it’s natural balance, in contrast to the lack of their own. The Fae influence on the human body was beyond what even the most advanced future science would be able to explain. There was no wound they couldn’t heal. No illness of anatomy they couldn’t cast out, save only the illness of their own Fae minds.

The first Fae children were immune to death. They lived forever, breeding amongst the humans and themselves: sons and daughters of Shamsiel making sons and daughters of their own. However not all of their children were created equally. Those that chose to mate with humans diluted their offspring’s’ bloodlines until their skin was no longer ocher or glowed. Their features and body would age as the years passed until they died from earthly sickness and ailments. These children of repeated couplings with earthly mothers and fathers began to lack the power to heal: man, beast or plant, their influence with animals all but gone. To some, however, it seemed a small price to pay. Those Fae that mated amongst themselves retained their unearthly gifts but at a price. The stronger their lineages’ power grew the weaker their minds became. Those that inbred solely amongst themselves developed unseemly features different from the humans or Shamsiel. Their skin no longer incandescent but dulled and eventually scaled. Their limbs curled into their bodies, faces lengthened and features sharpened grotesquely. They were prone to long periods of insanity, paranoid ramblings and cruel thoughts. They started wars amongst themselves and the Halflings driving their species towards the brink of extinction until they were forced into darkness.

The exile of pure Fae bloodlines was not initiated by their Halfling relatives or humans, but instead by a much higher power. One that Iona only spoke of in hushed tones that were almost whispers. As though the mere mentioning of her name, would cause her to appear. In her stories of the fall of the purebloods, she named the great force that came to wash the soils of lands inhabited by those cruel breeds of Fae, clean of their presence.

Dovev was their executioner. It was in the night that she came without warning, bringing a terror with her that no Fae had ever seen. The Seeing Soldiers, her instruments of death, spread out like a vast ominous albugineous shield. Cloaked in white, these minions moved without sound. Seamlessly coordinating, always knowing where their prey lay. They carried with them inhuman weapons, casted from the heavens. Eviscerating any full blooded Fae they encountered along the way.

The Seeing Soldiers slew the clans of pure-bred Fae, forcing those few that survived to flee into exile. But even there, they couldn’t escape being hunted to their ends. Appointed by both good and evil, Dovev was neither Fae nor God but instead something entirely different and far more powerful than anything their people had ever known. With her genocide of the Fae purists, this _Watcher_ of supernatural creatures imposed her decree that they, the Fae were no longer allowed to breed within their own communities. They would be forced to mate only within the human population. Losing the strength of their gifts with each new generation or risk Dovev’s wrath, with the punishment of death.

Few that survived were foolish enough to tempt her laws. Feared by all things unnatural on this earth, Dovev ruled without mercy and killed without remorse. For these species, the _unearthly_ , those who were not fully human, she was their God. Dovev, their final judge and jury. Sending them without remorse to a dark, cold place in the ground. Devoid of any afterlife.

The purge was not Dovev’s first encounter with the Fae people, nor would it be the last. But instead it would mark a turning point in their specie’s history. Those who complied and reproduced with their human counterparts were spared. But only for a short period of time before they too were hunted almost to extinction. Only this time it was the humans that came in night, pitch forks and fire ablaze, screaming of evil. What work Dovev hadn’t finished, the humans were all too eager to complete. And on rare occasions, when temerarious behavior warranted it, the Seeing Soldiers.

Clans were separated, sought out and slaughtered out of fear spread by human paranoia and lies. Many Fae that still possessed gifts within their bloodlines stopped practicing and teaching their daughters the gifts of Shamsiel. Sons however, were almost always safe. As they lacked all ability to manifest their unearthly gifts. Only males born of the rare remaining, inbred full blooded Fae parents could tap into their ancient power. But by Iona’s time, true male Fae were not only rare but considered extinct.

In all their time in the forest, only Aiyanna ever showed any Fae abilities. The older they grew, the more potent Aiyanna’s craft evolved to become. And although not surprising to Iona, it’s confirmatory nature only made the certainty of Esther’s future all that more difficult to acknowledge. Ester, although Fae by blood had come from a long time of women that had mated with the gifted Fae men but never produced capable girls. Their kind had a word in their secret language for offspring that couldn’t manifest. As the girls would someday come to understand, all creatures did. There would always be a classification of some type, for those of every species that were not neither Halfings or human. The Fae called them _Folamh_. Fae by bloodline alone, but really nothing but an empty human vessel.

Often cast out from their kind, the Folamh were seen as a curse. There powers unable to manifest regardless of their lineage. Those that would be classified as Folamh were neither Fae nor human. They hovered instead on the outskirts of the last existing clans. Most of their kind were slaves to the Fae. Submitting to a life of servitude through generations as they knew nothing different and were taught to fear living among humans. Often Folamh’s acted as intermediaries between their Master’s and the human world. Helping to keep the living Fae hidden and removed from any direct outside interaction with any but their own.

In their small corner of the world, however, the girls weren’t aware of any class distinction between them. Aiyanna understood that Ester was different from her and Iona but was taught that she was Fae all the same. Although Iona explained the difference in their gifts by using the term Folamh, she never taught the connotation that was associated. Rather, she raised the mismatched pair to believe that they were different but equal. Only Aiyanna was told in sparse detail while Ester slept, her purpose and the real reason why the girls had been given to Iona to raise. As a true Fae, it was Aiyanna’s responsibility to protect Ester. To watch over her friend, to love her and keep her from harm until Ester’s time had come. The particulars of Ester’s purpose, was always kept rather ambiguous to Aiyanna. All she knew was there was a chance Ester could be important to the Fae. She might possess something that they would need. Something that was secret and not quite known. Rather a rumor that could be true of a few select generational Folamh. If the whispers were correct, there was a chance, Ester would give their kind something that could possibly save them from destruction. And if not her, then perhaps Ester’s child, or another down the line. Some Folamh, somewhere, in the few remaining tribes that still existed, could be the answer to their exile.

The girls were linked together in a fated partnership. One of many that had happened over generations as the Fae waited for the promise they’d been given long ago. A chance at survival. An opportunity to bargain their fate with Dovev, could be born. But at their age, a promise, so obscure was too difficult to explain in any great detail. And it was the girls’ love for one another, their partnership that would sustain them through the changes that would come. In Iona’s mind, she knew when the time came for Aiyanna to bring Ester back to their people, she’d trained the girl to do so without hesitation. In her heart, she hoped, she’d fostered enough belief in their cause, that Aiyanna would be able to forgive herself when she discovered the _why_ of it all. Even if Aiyanna had no true understanding of Ester’s potential gift and her inevitable early death, Iona had to hope, the Fae girl she had raised would be able to make peace with the outcome. For Ester was never truly Fae but her life was tied to the service of the clan. The birth and her death, if she was the one, would be the _thing_ that could buy their eternal protection from the Seeing Soldiers. It could give them license to grow again and breed freely without fear of consequence. Ensuring that their kind did not become extinct. Yes, Iona knew Ester’s life would be short. And perhaps that is why she was so kind to the girl and treated her unlike an outcast. She wouldn’t be long in their world and she’d suffer greatly, but for a short while she’d be loved. Ester would be protected and cherished. Raised to know she was different but not alone. She would know if and when her time came that she too had once been loved. Until then, Iona believed she could keep the girls safe from anything that would threaten to unravel the Clan’s sincerest hope. Their illusion however, that feeling of invisibility Iona and the girls lived with in blissful naivety, would be shattered quickly without warning. Iona would spend her life in vain, preparing the girls for the time when their people would come to peacefully collect Ester. For when the clan did come, they’d find nothing but the bones of Iona’s corpse. Picked clean by the animals and elements over time. The small hut where the girls had been deposited as babies into Iona’s care, a ring of charred dust. Plants peaking their way through the burned remains, enveloping their once cherished home back into the earth from which it was made.

They came in the night, as most all nightmares do. Humans slithering through the woods like snakes in grass. With their torches lit and crosses barred the men of the church herded towards that forgotten home, nestled in the forest bearing nothing but ill will for its inhabitants. Fast asleep, the girls were roughly shaken awake by those same gnarled warm hands they had always known.

“Up girls… Up!” Iona whispered. The fire light flickered across her face, exposing a grave expression poisoned with fear.

“They have come….” Pulling the girls from their beds, she quickly tried to help them dress and hushed their questions, repeatedly warning them to keep quiet. Gathering them close, she pushed the hair from their eyes and kissed the tear stained cheeks. “They mean to harm us. Simpleminded, superstitious humans,” she spat, “They will kill you if they can. So, you must leave-” she started as the girl tried to whisper to her their protests.

Covering their mouths, she kissed their cheeks once more, attempting to temper their fears. “We will see each other again soon. I promise….” She looked to them in their vast confusion and waited for some sign of acknowledgement.

“You will go into the woods,” she continued, her voice wavering as she tried to hold the girl’s attention. The next few moments were precious and not a time for tears. “Remember the things I taught you, yes? You will be safe there, I promise. When it is time, you come back,” she whispered between them as she brought both girls into a tight embrace. With each second that passed the sounds of the men nearing grew louder until they were no longer the symphony of crackling torches, snapping twigs and low murmurs threatening them but now individual voices and words.

Wrapping Ester and Aiyanna in blankets, Iona continued to hold them close as she uncovered the window. Looking out into the night, past the men’s lit torches she called upon the creatures of forest that she had fed, cared for and healed. Hoping that the favor would be returned, she waited patiently for an answer even as the men of the church were bearing down upon their door.

Her faith in the wolves was not in vain. 

One by one in the darkness they appeared: dozens of yellow eyes glowing sinister in the night. What the girls couldn’t see they heard. The baritone harmony of visceral growls echoing through the blackness, calling out in warning before they attacked. The monks waved their wooden lanterns in the obsidian around them, searching for the source of these threats only to find nothing staring back. The wolves artfully dodging detection, stepping just outside their pool of light.

“Where are they?!” One called out, circling with his torch, waving it wildly as his weapon of choice.

“Stop this thaumaturgy old woman!” Another screamed, turning around to find Iona watching them as they panicked. Like a pack of crazed crows, the monks huddled together, squawking at one another in horror. Paranoid, the murder peered out into the night searching for the beast that toyed with them.

“Iona?” Aiyanna pulled at her, drawing her attention from the window.

“Shh... it will be over soon,” she promised kissing her hand.

And so, it began. The monks’ screams echoing through the dark as the wolves emerged from the forests one by one, teeth bared, jaws snapping. They ascended upon the murder of holy men with only their torches and metal crosses for protection. Iona seized the opportunity for the girls. Opening the door to their hut, she attempted to draw the girls’ gaze from the skirmish between the men and the wolves. To keep them from delaying themselves from running, for even a moment.

“You will look out for one another; love each other as I loved you.” She told them more than asked, as they both shook their heads in terror and confusion. Grabbing Aiyanna’s face, she looked her girl straight in the eye, in their last moments together, “You remember our purpose?” Aiyanna’s eyes filled with tears as the old woman’s fingers dug into her jaw, painful in their desperation, “Do not forget it. Do not forget who we are,” She demanded one last time before she pushed the girls from her, commanding they run. 

Confused, Ester and Aiyanna stumbled forward, catching glimpses and hearing shouts of the battle between beast and men at their backs. In the midst of the chaos, it was shocking to see that there were other people in their world beyond just the three of them. So much so that both girls felt a strange desire to stop and stare. The curiosity almost overtaking them. They had never seen men before. And strange creatures they were. Contorted shadowed faces waging war on the wolves the girls knew so fondly. The experience would make a lasting impression upon them both of the opposite sex.

“Run!” Iona yelled, as two monks broke away and began stumbling after them. Snapped out of their daze and whatever hesitation they had the girls did as they were told. Their young legs carrying them through the dense brush. The last glimpse Aiyanna and Ester had of Iona was her being beaten down by one of the holy men.

To the girls, Iona simply disappeared never to be seen again. They never saw her drug scrapping and clawing from that land she’d lived on for so many years. They would not witness her torture and seemingly endless questioning as to where the girls had fled. Nor would they know that she was burned alive, outside the monastery for necromancy. In their ignorance, the men of the church accused her of being a witch, a conjurer but perhaps that was just what they had told the people of village as justification for her eradication.

Iona was never a witch, although she was fully human either. She was Fae. The church, however was never nuanced enough to make or understand those distinctions. To their “Holy” church, Iona and her girls were nephilims. A broad term used for all species of half breeds that were not entirely human but byproducts of unholy couplings between _God’s_ creations and the angels of The Watch, long ago.

The girls wandered in the forest, living off the land for two days. Huddled together at night, wrapped as one, face to face in their blankets they would cry for Iona. Wondering where she was and when they would see her again. For comfort they appealed to their God for _her_ mercy, letting their prayers sooth them both to sleep with the hope that they would be answered.

In her ad hoc haste Iona hadn’t given clear instructions as to where they were to survive. The how, they understood, the why was now Aiyanna’s responsibility. But where were they to go in the forest to begin again? Like homing pigeons, they circled in the woods until they could stay away no longer. When they finally did return to that place they had known so well, their childhood home days later, they found it abandoned. Blood was scattered across the moss-covered ground that surrounded their hut. But there were no bodies to be found of wolf or man. Everything had been ransacked, things tossed about, belongings that had once meant something scattered. Iona was nowhere to be found but the girls were not alone. Waiting for them was a man; one dressed much the same as the others that had come for them days before.

Hesitant, the girls jumped as he stepped into the small hut where they stood bewildered and lost. “Hello,” he began, hand out trying to placate them both. “Do not be afraid. I will not harm you,” not directly anyhow. He was a monk from the monastery but not one who had come with the same intentions as the men before. He never gave the girls his name. He never answered their questions about Iona. He simply led them from the only childhood home they would ever know, taking them to place where he deemed, they would be safe. He could have returned them to the monastery and allowed the girls to succumb to the same fate as Iona but he wasn’t of the same creed as those from the monastery. He was a man of the church but he was also a man of Ireland. Raised on stories of the Fae, he hardly believed them to be real but decided even if they were, he couldn’t justify in his mind the slaughtering of two innocent girls. So instead of offering them up as sacrifices to the Great Purge he took them from Vodii to Ebla, a small village not far from Liatháin. There, they were given to a woman. The girls knew it was a mistake to leave the forest. They knew they should have stayed as Iona would have wanted. How would the Fae be able to find them now? How would they know where they had gone? Both had tried to fight the well-intended monk. They tried to run, more than once before they arrived at Ebla. But they were never able to succeed. One of them always within the holy man’s grasp, as he reminded them that they were not safe. That even if they succeeded and didn’t go with him, they would be found again by the church and not be treated with his same kindness. While in Elba, Aiyanna hardly slept. Days and nights as the girls worked in the woman’s home, serving her family, Aiyanna thought of nothing but their escape. She had made Iona a promise. She had a purpose, to protect Ester. But more importantly to be there with her friend, when their people returned for them both. As weeks passed to months and months to years, she attempted to flee with Ester many times, but was never successful. Their captors, wise enough to rarely allow the girls to be alone together, knew that one could not leave without the other. They used their love for each other to keep them. As the years came and went, the two were passed from that home to one other. Their final place of residence could hardly be called a home. Out of desperation for coin, their second family sold both girls to a trader- a peddler, who worked in the markets of Cork. They were with that decrepit old man for only a short period before they were sold for the final time in market, to a group of Vikings returning to Normannaland.

How far the two girls had come from warm hands and soft words in that hut nestled in the forests of Vodii to a land across the ocean. They were spared from men doing _God’s work_ only to be sold into slavery. It seemed the God of those monasteries, of the Roman’s was different from Iona’s. For theirs ruled from hatred and punishment. In the eyes of the church or rather from the mouths of its men, all those that were not human, Christian and men, were to be punished by nature. For that was the will of God. But how could a God that would creature such beings as the Fae, allow such life, hate it as they proclaimed? How could a God that made women, value them so little as the church seemed to think? Their God was nothing like Iona’s, the only one the girls would know. For her God knew who they were. _She_ loved the Fae, their people and those girls as _She_ loved any other creation. The Gods of men would come and go in their lifetime. Ester and Aiyanna would learn of many but they would know the truth of only one. The God of their childhood, the Fae’s God. Iona’s God and theirs as well. 


End file.
